Various devices for the treatment of fluids and for effecting mass and/or heat transfer have been used, for example, for various types of medical treatments such as hemodialysis, hemofiltration, plasmaferesis and immunotherapy. Additional fields of use for such devices are, for example, dialysis and filtration in general, such as in connection with the cleaning or desalinization of seawater. Such apparatus according to the present invention may also be used as heat exchangers and/or blood oxygenators.
Such devices are generally disclosed in the art, for example, in U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,990,251 and 5,002,668, as well as European Patent No. 0,305,672 A1 and European Application No. 91.101006.4. Each of these patents, however, shows the use of inlets and outlets for the second fluid being arranged as nipples on the housing and provided with rather complicated tools for the manufacture of the housing.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,724,900, for example, describes an apparatus which has such inlets and outlets arranged in the end caps. A disadvantage of the design in this patent, however, is that the housing must be provided with openings in front of the inlets and outlets for one of the fluids. It is an object of the present invention to provide an improvement over these prior art devices